Art Critic

Axel Becker Palazzo Pisani Revedin: Essence and Essentiality: Minimalism

From 19 to 31 October, the Arte Borgo Gallery presents the solo exhibition of Axel Becker curated by Anna Isopo in the prestigious Palazzo Pisani Revedin in Venice, which houses one of the pavilions of the 59th Art Biennale, entitled “Essence and Essentiality: Minimalism”. Axel Becker’s production is distinguished by a strongly minimalist style and a constant search for the essentiality of forms, in stark contrast to the chaotic set of stimuli and information which characterizes contemporary society, and in which consumerism is an integral part of the daily life. Since the notion of minimalism is on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, the artist expresses such contrast using a simple but extremely effective and sophisticated language, based precisely on a conceptual component of a reductionist mission, rendered in the form of three-dimensional paintings and sculptures created using various materials, including fiberglass, ceramic, carbon, tin, and bronze. Through his predominantly monochromatic works, Becker carries out an expressive synthesis of compositional and chromatic elements endowed with particular refinement and originality, aimed at creating an intense artistic poetics rich with meaning, feelings, concepts and, above all, personality. These qualities make Axel Becker’s production incredibly peculiar: the sinuous and harmonious shapes of his sculptures alternate with the monotone tones of the paintings, between concreteness and abstraction. The result is a lyrical and symbolic evocation, a clear reference to a theoretical and artistic context, but simultaneously philosophical and metaphysical, combined together in the work of art with the aim of instilling an abstract idea and evoking the sense of the sublime and deep inner states. In Axel Becker’s production, nature and humanity come together in a surprisingly contemporary artistic language, in which the artist overcomes the very distinction between a painting and a sculpture: this is demonstrated by his monochrome canvases with castings or incrustations of molten and relief metal, thanks to which the painting abandons the two-dimensional sphere in order to give rise to the more proper dimension of a sculpture. In the same way, using a limited chromatic range in this case, Becker breaks away from the three-dimensionality of the statuary, flattening the forms, thus preventing their “penetrability”. His sculptures (see “Homage to Munch – L’Urlo”) in fact arise from a process of simplification of the human figure; in a play of concave and convex surfaces, a structure is created using graceful shapes, with an undulatory motion and thus an emblem of an irrepressible and, at the same time, essential dynamism. Through the aforementioned metal sedimentations, the artist-alchemist puts in place a reflection on Nature and its four elements: water as if it was petrified in its natural flow; immobile raindrops, too tired to continue with their journey; magma that solidifies on the surface suggesting a sense of durability and solidity; melted material on the surface imitating planets riddled with craters, waterfalls, and various shapes, all evocative of the vastness of Nature and the grandeur of the Cosmos. Overall, Axel Becker’s production is entirely based on a minimal reduction of the artistic content and on the desire to achieve a formal purity which brings us back to the world of abstraction. In fact, it is apparent that the artist has learned a lesson from Mondrian, Malevich, and Klein, and reworked it in a modern and personal manner. By placing the emphasis on the objectivity and physicality of the work and relying on an essential formal lexicon, Becker goes in search of the absolute in an atmosphere of an almost religious silence, and creates works that “talk about the complexity of a soul using minimal language, a heterogeneous language polarized through a complex synthesis to the representation of reality”.

Martina Scavone Venice, 2022

Soul Minimal by Axel Becker

The complexity of a soul, both human and as the essence of an artistic creation, can also be expressed through an extreme synthesis. This is the case with Axel Becker’s intuitive works, characterized by reductionist operations of colors and shapes that erode the distance and distinction between painting and sculpture. He draws from everyday rhetoric to synthesize and condense our reality into few elements. This is evident in the constructive parts of the work where new readings appear aiming to achieve balance and produce compositional relationships in the context in which they are represented.

Becker creates a three-dimensional “plastic poetry”, inviting reflection on the complexity of human communication and its codes; his ability lies in proposing a minimal language that moves away from the ordinary and repeatable meaning of signs and inserted objects, to reach the unique event of subjectivity and interpretation. In fact we can notice inclusions of melted metal, taking on new meanings, in his monochromatic canvases.

For example, the mimetic effect of the fluidity of water is actually generated by metal; more precisely, by the change of state of tin from solid to liquid, which then condenses into a new form of reality that is no longer merely imagined. It is a sort of “poetic alchemy” that springs from the imaginary and transmutes into the real world in new conditions of representability.

It seems almost an attempt to reproduce the “feeling” of water, its sounds, its density, held in its particular dynamism. The fusion interacts not only among the molecules, but also with the surrounding environment, leaving a clearly visible and changed trace. In his other works the union of form and content is even more explicit, in new relationships between the meaning and signifier.

Therefore, an original model of the meaning as a context is produced, of Duchampian memory, which depends on the exchange with the viewer and with the space in which the objects are placed; and this is how a corkscrew is isolated from its context and original function and, placed on a canvas, can be realized as a new index, for example as imaginary clock hands. In addition, the sculptures, particularly those in fiberglass, play on movements of elegant sinuosity; they are simplifications of the human figure designed to indicate a formal purity, reducing it almost to abstraction.

Peculiar are the concave and convex effects and the layer of paint that creates a smooth and almost perfect structure, able to reflect light and create evocative dynamic impressions. And it is thanks to color and light that the synthesis of dynamism makes us fully enjoy the sculpture, pushing us to its integral reading. In Axel Becker, therefore, we catch experimental curiosities, in techniques and contents, that condense and summarize the experiences of our contemporaneity.

Dott. Giorgio Vulcano, Rom, 2021

About the work of Axel Becker

The artist Axel Becker, born in 1965 in Frankfurt, in his numerous exhibitions throughout Europe brings his works to dialogue with one another and with the canon of art history. The minimalist collage-like paintings and massive fiberglass sculptures alternate between abstraction and figuration. With reduced speech of colours and shapes, and focused on materials and shaping surfaces, these works are codes for a contemplative counter-draft to worldly reality.

Painting

Axel Becker’s paintings clearly belong to the tradition of abstract-constructivist painting, whose stylistic elements and colour palette he adapts and transfers to the present. For Becker, awarded this year for his abstract work “Orange Square” (2019) as a semi-finalist at the Art-Box Zürich, the Bauhaus was also a source of inspiration and a starting point for dealing with “classics” and the question of their meaning in the context of contemporary art creation and today’s reception of art.

Becker’s minimalist-monochrome works are not to be read self-referentially, but as a conscious counter-draft of the present, whose overflowing digitality is increasingly opposed to haptic experiences and contemplative moments. Becker sees his works as a window to introspection. The coloured surfaces and clear shapes are intended to bring people into balance and put them into a contemplative state: “Minimalism is meditation,” says Axel Becker. The artist in the same way sees the surfaces that appear monochrome to the human eye, such as desert, forest or sea, as an (unconscious) drive for people to retreat into nature.

Although not visible in the works, in Becker’s abstract, minimalist works, the human being is always the focus.

It is no coincidence that the classical element water, in its various forms and states of aggregation, is the theme of the series “Elements”. Small, molten metal plates are applied to boldly monochrome blue, grey or red surfaces, which form a raised surface and transfer the works into the space. The glittering drops seem to follow the laws of physics. Becker, though, leaves out what affects the water and sets it in motion, but one can easily follow the direction of the flow, its speed and dynamics on the canvas. Axel Becker manages to convey the sounds of water in his paintings; the steady rippling of a waterfall (“Waterfall Blue”, 2019), whose drops eventually compact in order to disperse again, the spraying of individual drops (“Splash”, 2019) or the rattle of ice (“Icicle”, 2018).

Objects: “The Beginning”

The fiberglass sculptures initially appear as a counterpoint. “Beginnings I-V” rely on classic, three-dimensional representations of the human body. The front and back are equivalent and form the respective counterform. Massive, organic and with the hint of male and female principles, “The Beginning” evokes associations related to the myth of creation and unification as the beginning of all life.

But while individual expression, transformation and disintegration are inherent to the human body and recurring object of contemporary sculpture, Axel Becker’s monochrome sculptures signal constancy, uniformity and invulnerability. These bodies are neither idealized nor the cultural references are ascribed to them.

In line with his paintings and reliefs, in “The Beginning“, Becker places a central focus on material and surface. The skin of the sculptures does not show any incisions or traces of the creation process, instead, through the repeated application of layers of paint, it becomes a perfectly smooth and shiny shell. The surface reflects the light from the environment, allowing the rich, distinctive colour of the respective sculpture (white, red, green, blue) to appear in various shades. At the same time, the main concern of Axel Becker is that the sculpture and the observer interact through these reflections and that the observer, by observing the “The Beginning”, becomes aware of his own physicality.

“The Beginning I” was created during a working visit to prof. Josip Diminić in Croatia and represents the first sculpture created by Axel Becker in general. “The Beginning”, the negative of which Becker handcrafted in layers from a styrofoam cube, marks the turning point in his work. He leaves two-dimensional space and for the first time takes on the human body, formally and thematically.

Working mode

Since the beginning of his artistic career, almost 20 years ago, experimenting has played a key role in the art of Axel Becker. He tests different styles, mixes them together and explores how much experimentation is possible within his minimalist approach, without losing his own signature. Axel Becker works without archives, sketches or memo boards. His works are created intuitively and spontaneously. In that process, the subject and the choice of material go hand in hand. A large part of his inspiration comes from everyday life and the art world.

The works of the past five years are characterized by new techniques and themes, equally following the desire for works of art to accompany people in their everyday lives and bring them back to themselves.

Karin Scheuermann, Stuttgart, 2020

Necessaria tantum. Minimalist art by Axel Becker between rationality and lyrical evocation

Patet ergo quod ex omnibus […] metallis potest fieri aurum et ex omnibus præter aurum potest fieri argentum […]. Nullum dubium est quod, si permitterentur in actione
Naturæ, ad tempus in aurum et argentum converterentur

(“It is clear, therefore, that gold can be made of all […] metals and that silver can be made of all metals, except of gold […]. There is no doubt that if they are left to the action of Nature, at some point they would turn to gold and silver “)
Pseudo Thomas Aquinas, Tractatus de lapide philosophico

The exhibition of German artist Axel Becker (Elements) is focused on pure monochrome works in blue, black, burgundy, yellow, orange and pearl: the Cartesian ‘clear and pronounced’ basic mosaic elements of a broad artistic discourse.

Axel Becker is in love with evocation and synthesis: necessaria tantum, i.e. nothing more than necessary in his works, never beyond in his paintings. In fact, he directs his minimalist observation to a series of strict monochromes that are absolute in themselves (more or less large, rectangular or square), then assembled together or on which metals melt like ‘holes’ that secretly wink at Alberto Burri or like ‘cuts’ of Fontana’s spatialist origin. These metal incrustations ‘externally’ reflect virtual light beams, affecting the monochromatic ‘interior’ of the painting: magmatic sediments that ‘open’ and ‘unveil’ ‘the other’ of the painting by means of significant glares that unite the uniform background of the canvas with the Nature that is luminous and deprived of a recognizable form (significantly, perhaps, an unreachable beyond). It seems as if these simple and ‘poorly’ minimalistic paintings contain a lifelong experience.

The artist resonates the echo of the pre-war ‘classical’ geometric abstraction (Mondrian) in his compositions which could be called quadrangular pieces-mosaic elements, on which he grafts the experience born on the ashes of the World War II ashes and the rescission of any safety (black monochrome painting), but without any implications of the French noir existentialism that reduced everything to the pure mechanism of existence. He goes his own way following the footsteps of the non-existentialist ‘nothing’, but reducing to zero the globalized consumerism against Nature from which again could start the way of ‘redemption’ and which is almost symbolized by the above-mentioned absolute and ‘basic’ monochromes rooted in the suprematist experiences of Kazimir Maljevič from the beginning of the twentieth century (an abstract art free of practical and aesthetic purposes, favouring a pure plastic sensitivity), the experiences that derived those of Yves Klein in 1950s.

In antique painting, the expression monochrome denoted a fresco or a painting painted only in different shades of the same colour, but by choosing ‘the monochrome’ (1956), hence the ‘single’, the ‘absolute’, Klein gave it a profoundly new and different meaning: he distanced himself from the phenomenon of spectacularity and contraposition. In other words, in the conception influenced by Japanese zen, the canvas was no longer the ‘staging’ of a drama, of a tension between unequal forces (such as colours and shapes). Thus, the monochrome “simply represents the blue itself, or the red itself, or […] for example, the cosmic landscape of yellow […]. I refuse to make a show of my painting. I refuse to oppose the elements.” For Klein, ‘the void’ was a state similar to nirvana, without material influences, an area where one could come into direct contact with his or her own sensitivity in order to see reality ‘beyond’ its representation. In other words, Klein deprived the artistic form of all of its content: the paintings no longer had scenes, creating the “Areas of Intangible Artistic Sensibility”.

Like Klein’s works, Becker’s monochromes relate to theoretical-artistic and philosophical-metaphysical contexts: the artwork seems to consist of combining them together, making us perceive and understand the abstract idea. It is not, therefore, a question of ‘zeroing’ the painting in the expectation of a new and undefined source of inspiration, but for the artist ‘everything’ is already contained in that ‘void’, just as in certain Eastern philosophies. Its monochromes represent the ‘void’ made of saturated and absolute colour but not of shapes and drawings, which contains everything as at the primordial dawn of the creation of the universe.

These monochromes represent the psychological dimension of a cosmic allusion that, however, does not end in itself. In Axel’s works we do not in fact find a ‘radical’ or extreme, brilliant and sunny view at the monochrome, but the monochrome itself is seen by aggregations (by ‘fragments’ or ‘pieces’), or as a background, precisely due to the overlying presence of metal incrustations, drifting continents that cool their magma and reintroduces an abstract-figurative visionary (‘abstract – concrete’ would probably said Lionello Venturi) strange to Klein, the visceral subjective and descriptive emotionality, typical of the Western world, brought back to us together with an intriguing technical skill.

Undoubtedly, in the foundations of these Becker’s experiences are two main factors: minimalism and lyrical and symbolic evocation.

Minimalism – easy to remember – was an artistic movement born and developed in the United States at the beginning of the sixties. The term was first used by the English philosopher Richard Wollheim in the essay entitled Minimal Art. The minimalist works – and those of Becker as well – use a basic formal lexicon, are composed of only a few elements; formal matrices are geometry, strict execution, limited chromatism, substantial absence of decorations. More generally, minimalist painting is monochromatic, sometimes with grids and matrices of mathematical origin, but yet able to evoke a sense of sublime and deep inner states. This last meaning includes Becker’s minimalism.

A point of reference is Frank Stella, one of the leading promoters of minimalist art, the author of famous Black Series or Black Paintings, paintings without frames consisting of parallel black stripes divided by thin white lines. However, these works, unlike Becker’s, do not have allusive or symbolic reference to something, but they are presented to the observer as objects carrying a value simply because they are as they are.

On monochromatic canvas sometimes are deposited the mentioned metal drippings: the object or the natural sensation alluded by our artist are present and absent at the same time, and Minimalism thus reaches its maximum level. A Minimalism. However, that often takes over ‘poetic’ and, so to speak, almost ‘neo-romanticist’ accents, touching, but only briefly, lyrical abstraction, the abstraction lyrique whose birth was decided by Georges Mathieu in 1947. Thus, in a dynamic contrast to the rational ‘norm’ of a strict monochrome and ‘geometrical’ canvas (universal and timeless form that becomes the spatial element of its abstract art and a colour, a fundamental system that underlines the visible reality), the Abstract expressionism ‘timidly’ emerges above it: informal drippings ​​and gestural fusion of shining metals reveal irrational deep and primordial seas, unknown skies, distant universes and galaxies, ‘foreign’ territories (external, but also internal to my own ‘I’). Above the pure reason stands the revenge of the Freud’s and Nietzsche’s irrationalism. The lyrical expressiveness thus distances Becker from the experiences of programmed art, analytical painting and conceptual painting. By transferring the purity of the colour on the canvas according to cold and rational schemes, he puts on the total zeroing the gesturality of matter in its original state before taking the form, aiming to find a new way to obtain an image of beauty painted by light on the painting surfaces.

The essence of these fundamental (water, air, fire, earth) and ‘alchemical’ elements is a flame that does not destroy, but melts, unifies, creates, vivifies: water as petrified in its natural flow, a consolidated magma ‘eruption’ solidified on the surface of the inner emotions and thoughts about Nature, the ‘frozen’ melting of metals that reminds of planets quilted with craters, moons, water drops, waterfalls, vibrations of liquids stopped and stuck in their dynamism, changing the liquid state into solid, conveying the emergence into the motionless dimension of eternal, melting together eternity and contingency.

Circles, drops and fragments as coins of solidified water of an ancient Mediterranean civilization that re-emerged in the archaeological dimension of ancient incrusted and corroded silver Greek tetradrachms projected into contemporary and future skies, where the anodyne rational geometry of monochromatic ‘cold’ squares welcomes the irrational ‘contradiction’ of luminous and twinkling irregular achromatic shapes resulting from a natural magmatic ‘event ‘. Incandescent melted metals in dense masses in their synthetic silvery clarity reveal all the intriguing fascination of the Antiquity maintaining, in a rigorous and simplified essential modernity, the sense of the Greco-Roman cultural and existential metaphor.

Thus, that single apparently uniform colour in enlivened in myriad of vital impulses that lead to a peaceful reflection, veiled by a suffused lyricism in a close empathy between the author-alchemist (Becker) and the observer-spectator who gets involved in the work.

Therefore, there are two possible groups of works of our artist exhibited in Monreale.

The first is given by works each consisting of a series of monochromatic juxtaposed canvases, as if to form a puzzle or, even better, mega-pieces of an abstract and geometric mosaic in the manner of Mondrian’s painting. Perhaps precisely because it is exhibited in Monreale, the ‘homeland’ of large mosaics shining with gold and colours (green, white, purple red and cobalt blue) of the twelfth century, the reference to the mosaic itself is by no means incidental. The elements assembled to form a design with quadrangular meshes, somewhat like a Harlequin’s suit, which could even theoretically be interchanged, as in some of the ludo painting works. But the composition with its assonant colours ‘captures’ the essence of a special reality, as in the totem of Autumn, where the colour ranges bring back a memory of colours, from golden to red, to orange, to the moss-green of the undergrowth and deciduous trees, or in the totem of Winter, where the grey and silver tones of the foggy or snowy winter landscape prevail. The Nature we intuit and relive by evocation in our mind and in our hearts, reminding us of some of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s poems, such as Autunno (Autumn) ¹, La neve (Snow) ², La serena fiesolana (Evening in Fiesole) ³ or La pioggia nel pineto (Rain in the pinery) ⁴. And then, in the second group, just the falling drops of a virtual rain that stands out against the dark cobalt blue colour of the night (Water drops), drops that can also be found in the various elements constituting a totem, and which, as in a sequence of frames, starting from the top, end up breaking down on the ground in the last “frame” below (The falling drops). Or a single drop, dense and luminous, against a red background that, falling from an invisible alembic, loses its original form due to gravity and spreads, dies and turns into a compact and sinuous anamorphic reality

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^[1] “Autumn, that in her eyes / and in the taciturn sea / mirror your red / gold / […] I have never felt the sadness / so strong / that only you spread / […] among the dead leaves! / […] She was silent, closed in the black / tunic where pale flowers / were scattered, Autumn, like yours that / you gild / on the vain stalk […] “.

² “Come down with peace, / oh snow: and defend / the roots and offspring / that will still give / so much grass to the herds, / and bread to a man”.

³ “[…] The tree [of the mulberry] […] is silvered / with its bare branches […] Oh evening, / praised be for your pearl face […] Let my sweet evening song / be like the rain that knocks / tepid and fugitive […] on the fields of wheat that yet is not ripe / and is not green, / and on the hay that is already harvested/ and changing its colour […]. / Oh evening, / praised be for your pure and intact death, and for the wait that makes tremble / the first rising stars!”

⁴ “[…] I hear/ some other words / spoken by droplets and leaves / in the distance. / Listen. It rains / from scattered clouds. / Rain on the tamarisks / brackish and thirsty, / rain on the pines / scaly and bristling, / rain on the myrtle / divine […]. Now you can hear all over the frond / rustles / the silver rain / that purifies […] “.

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that resembles an ‘alive’ and volatile mercury (Drops), a mercury that, along with the sulphur, in alchemy was considered a primordial element with which any other metal was formed, even silver and gold, containing in itself all the different aspects and quality of the matter.

And again, on the monochrome red canvas, the scattered drops may appear as of Wine in the glass, or, on the dark one a Puddle, which realistically resemble to water splashes made of ‘thrown’ liquid metal and then solidified, or ‘frozen’ drips of the Ice Age, of a petrified Waterfall or of an Icicle. Everything always revolves around water and metals, their heating and their fusion and evaporation and again around their cooling and their condensation and solidification: solve et coagula, alchemists have always aspired to it, to evolve and regenerate.

More complex compositional constructions in Snow ball in the air, where the silver metallic ‘snow’ ball (almost corroded and unreadable coin from the past) ‘twirls’ over a deep blue sky in the background, divided into four quadrangles, as if seen through a window with a white frame, which reminds us of some – although more informal and gestural – Interrupted Views, work of popular art by Mario Schifano. Lyrical and dreamlike ‘impressions’ that materialize on the starred night sky with a big moon with metallic reflections. In the Dance of the metals, on a uniform and anodyne black background, a silvery ‘boiling’ metal fluid shatters into streams and drops like oil in the water, like a galaxy exploded after the Big Bang, in a majestically centrifugal dynamic, which, astonished, calls in mind the greatness of the Cosmos, but projected and blocked in the pauperistic microcosmos of the canvas and of an almost organic matter captured under a microscope.

But Becker’s works are not always pure natural sensation: in the ‘triptych’ composition of Hanging hearts, from the last white square at the bottom, overlaid with a perforated metal mesh, hangs on a chain a small surreal heart from postmodern and popular fairy-tale, which does not lack ironic accents. The Scream is a sort of modern reinterpretation, touching with its ‘cold’ key the Optical Art of the eighteenth-century Sturm und Drang which is at the basis of German Romanticism (but partially deprived of the sense of the Goethean sublimity and destructive force that destroys and annihilates) and the existential and all-encompassing scream of Munch. A metallic and silver drop is placed at the centre of an aura of acoustic ‘waves’ (composed of a black monochrome background of the canvas) that radiates between the hexagonal threads of a superimposed metal mesh. The colour is then shown in effigy of blacks, becoming itself an icon. An absolute and primary monochrome, which represents the absorption of the entire light spectrum, takes on all the enchantment of the sublime, without sinking into conceptual art forms. In other words, applying the Kantian concept of the aesthetics of the sublime expressed in his Critique of Judgment, we can confirm that at Becker there is no a dynamical sublime, suggesting amazement and dismay as a result of the awareness of our limits and our powerlessness, but a mathematical sublime, where a calm reflection on our dignity elevates us above the immensity and immeasurable grandeur of Nature itself.

And again, in the blue of the basic monochromy, stands out a metallic mesh cut in the form of rational and geometric right triangle, from which informal and ‘irrational’ drops hang or fall. A paradigmatic example of contaminatio or coincidentia oppositorum present in Becker’s works and of which we have spoken, i.e., the dialectical and non-conflictual relationship between ratio and pathos insensatus, between instinct and reason, between mind and heart, typical of Germanic culture since the nineteenth century.

But perhaps the most emblematic works in this sense are My way, Brothers in arms and the Money for nothing series.

In the first of these paintings, on a purple background, various vertical elements stand out as if forming an interrupted line – road marking. However, they are not all perfectly aligned, as if to indicate not so much the ‘road accidents’ along the road, but rather the exit from the monotony of uniformity, from the mass, to confirm one’s own personality, each different and coming out of stereotyped conventions. In the second painting, two circles or rings of metal intersect on a red background and their ‘conjugal’ conjunction indicates the senses of solidarity, camaraderie and collaboration, the spirit of communion and brotherhood along the ‘battle’ of life. Finally, the series dedicated to money is like a quiet reflection on the relativity of the value of money itself: copper and brass coins embedded in lead dripping, always on monochrome backgrounds of canvases, are blocked, made prisoners as if in the depth of abyss after the sinking of the ship that carried them; their tinkling no longer resounds, money does not ‘run’ anymore, it has become useless, it has no value, it has lost its falsely ‘divine ‘and omnipotent purpose.

Elements is the title of his exhibition. Elements of a whole, i.e., components, fundamental parts that constitute a whole through their aggregation, but also chemical elements of the Periodic Table, gaseous, liquid and solid (such as, according to increasing atomic number or number of protons, iron, copper, silver, tin, gold, mercury and lead, known since ancient times). With this term, therefore, we can understand both the different monochrome and serial ‘mosaic elements’ or ‘pieces’ that constitute various possible aggregations, as in a mechanistic DNA chain of life, and the various metallic ‘elements’ that impress vibrating ‘soul’ in a cold and inert matter, where the ‘experimenter’ Axel plays the role of a modern alchemist in search of ‘his’ philosopher’s stone which transforms plain metals into gold and silver, that is, transforms materiality into spirit. Already according to Platonism, all Nature was held to be intimately populated by energies and arcane forces, sort of luminous Irrlichters from Goethean memory, hidden in the obscurity of matter and Mother Earth, and the task of the philosopher was to awake them again. The artist’s task – it seems that Becker alludes to it – is to overcome the seemingly irreconcilable dualism between vivid spirit (the darting and informal metals) and amorphous matter (the abstractly geometric monochromes) reflected in the correspondence between the exterior ‘workshop’ and the interior ‘laboratory ‘, giving rise to the possibility that all the metals present in the womb of the Earth can symbolically be destined to become silver and gold (perfection in all matter): thus the union between the false opposites heals the ‘decomposition’ of the ‘logic’ matter itself, imprinting in it that irrational quid and absurdum that tones it.

Axel’s ‘silver’ metal, his melted tin in drops spread on the surface, puts this element in contact with its alchemical symbolism, which is the breath and thus, the breath of life.

As in the great transcendental allegory of the sacred and royal citadel of Monreale and its mosaics, precisely the Light is the thread that unravels the skein: the light reflected by those metallic drippings that constitute ‘informal’ or ‘differently’ formal ‘presences’, personalize and vivify, almost spiritualizing that matter governed by pure reason and by the eternal and unchangeable geometric, mathematical and physical laws, the laws of evolution and survival of Nature in the Universe.

Giampaolo Trotta, 2019

An exhibition of works by the German artist Axel Becker, entitled ‘3D’, at Wagensperg Castle

An exhibition by the artist Axel Becker will take place in the gallery at Wagensperg Castle in autumn 2019. An economist by profession, he began his successful career as an artist five years ago.

At the exhibition at the castle, he is presenting twenty-three works of art – specifically, pictorial objects and a sculpture – which have defined the underlying concept of the display: the individual in the modern world and the world that surrounds them. The title ‘3D’ can be seen as an explanation for the multicoloured canvases on display, which have been transformed into objects through the addition of affixed metal parts and various other items. At the same time, through these works, he also presents the three-dimensional life of modern man – or rather, the world and the space that embrace him. This modern world is a stripped-back world of minimalist images, defined by simple symbols – mostly everyday objects (keys, corkscrews), geometric patterns (squares, circles), natural forms (drops, waterfalls, puddles, depicted in metal) and expressive, brightly coloured canvases – backdrops that render the emptiness of the modern world more vivid and dynamic. Alongside the exhibited artworks, the artist also presents abstract clocks that measure time for modern man, that is, the so-called fourth dimension.

The exhibition could also be titled ‘Modern Man in Space and Time’.

In the exhibition rooms at Wagensperg Castle, this exhibition is entirely devoted to the relationships and contrasts between nature, the environment and modern man – a being who once sprang from pure nature but has since created his own space using new, even unnatural, materials. The focus of the exhibition is therefore the human being, represented by the sculpture – an androgynous figure. For this abstract human figure, which embodies both masculine and feminine aspects, the artist has chosen white as the colour that contains within itself all the colours of the spectrum. The genitals are strongly emphasised on both sides of this figure. The female side is reminiscent of the famous archaic figure of the Palaeolithic Venus of Willendorf – the goddess of fertility – whilst the other, male side, with its strongly emphasised male phallus, serves as an abstract reminder of the early religious statuettes from the history of humankind. This human likeness – which we might also call the yin and yang of the modern world – is made of the most controversial material of our time: plastic. The statue is pure form, as in the work of Henry Moore, and bears the meaningful title ‘Sculpture Beginning White’. The surface of the sculpture is smooth and refined to the point of abstraction, and its form brings to life an erotic sculptural figure of the modern world.

It is also the only object in the exhibition that is made from synthetic materials. Modern humans are alien to nature, yet they are descended from it and bound by its natural laws, which have not yet disappeared from the planet (in one of the pictures in the exhibition, the artist calls it ‘Metal Planet Purple’, 2018): the seasons, the four elements and time. It is therefore no surprise that the exhibition’s concept begins with the image of a ‘fruit on a red background’ (“Fruit red”, 2019), which could be interpreted as a reference to the fruit of knowledge eaten by the first parents, or to the original sin of the first parents, Adam and Eve, and continues with a number of abstract paintings of clocks on various backgrounds, which measure and display time for modern man. The Kronos of the modern world is abstractly simple, depicted only with a functional object (a corkscrew, a key) in place of the hands and with a few main lines of the clock. The evocative title ‘Time for Wine’ (‘Time for wine orange’, 2019 – the artist specifies the colour in the title depending on the background, so we have orange, metal, blue and grey) and the hands pointing to five o’clock allude to the time of day set aside for relaxation.

In the emptiness of the modern world, which is interwoven with the visual – something well represented in the exhibition by canvases painted in various bright colours (red, orange, blue and violet), which sometimes fade into white and black, or their shades, in keeping with the symbolism – it is in this emptiness, then, that at around five o’clock in the afternoon, a person finds the much-needed peace and also has time for fun. .. As everything settles down, they pour themselves a glass of pure wine.

The space surrounding the abstract figure is intended to facilitate a dialogue between this fundamentally pure human being and nature, as well as the contrasts between them. The smooth form of the human sculpture contrasts with the geometric shapes in which the artist has chosen to depict nature. Standing in the space as a contrast to the human sculptures is a tree, composed of two vertical rectangular canvases forming a diptych. The tree’s leaves are geometric in shape, depicted as small squares of various colours. The shape of the tree and its leaves is repeated on the accompanying canvases, which feature the motif of the four seasons. In spring, the leaves of the large geometric tree dance in a wide variety of shades of yellow and green; in autumn, they fall in the characteristic autumnal colours; in winter, they blend into metallic shades whilst evoking snow; In summer, they seem to glow with a sunny colour, and circles – shapes representing the sun – join the small squares. The other objects in the room represent an abstract interplay of geometric shapes and colours. Squares are glued onto rectangular bases, often extending beyond the edges of the canvas or painted lines. Perhaps they symbolise the contemporary world, which is full of moments where established values are violated and, at the same time, full of rude, disruptive interruptions.

In contrast to this room is the next and final room, in which paintings with witty titles are displayed. The main theme of the modern world, which cuts through the poetry of the coexistence of nature and humankind in the previous room, is, of course, money. The artist calls his paintings ‘Money for nothing’. He arranges the images of tin coins dynamically across the differently coloured canvases (selecting from a palette already seen). Here, and in other works associated with the four elements – particularly the element of water – he creates a visual contrast between the smooth surface of the canvas and the coarse material upon it. Using the coarse material of tin, he depicts smooth images from nature – jets of water, drops, waterfalls, puddles, sea foam, icicles. The focal point of the room is a red canvas featuring two half-covered metal circles, which resemble two wedding rings.

The meaning of humanity is, without a doubt, love. Among the items on display, the object known as *Die Matrize* (‘Matrix’) is perhaps a symbolic representation of modern art, in which forms, motifs and techniques are repeated in a copied manner – a characteristic of this exhausted world.

Throughout the exhibition, the use of minimalism – an almost perfect reduction of objects from the visual arts – is particularly interesting. Painted visual motifs replace small objects from everyday life (corkscrews, stoppers, rings) and geometric–mathematical forms (circles, rectangles, squares; visual objects created in these shapes), as well as natural forms such as tears, water droplets, waterfalls, puddles, sea foam, icicles…

The artist’s visual language is abstract, which also corresponds to the concept of the relationship between humans and nature, their connections and contrasts within the framework of the dimensions of time and space. The materials from which the artist constructs the narrative and objects are of geometric and natural forms. He then glues these onto the traditional canvas to create abstract, refined images. On the abstractly painted canvases, the small glued-on objects are almost lost, like the microcosm within the macrocosm. His objects are a unique interplay of dynamics, forms, contrasts, light and the objects of the modern world.

The artist is constantly seeking a harmony between what are now classic abstract forms and modern materials. The meaningful, and at times witty, titles lend the exhibited works a special touch.

At first glance, the exhibition may seem to shock us with the emptiness and purity of its forms, as well as the expressiveness of its colours; yet it is precisely this that sets us on a path of reflection on the modern world, time and space, forms and visual art – which, in this instance, draws on abstract forms and materials such as metal and plastic to speak to the essence of modern humanity. The artist Axel Becker presents us with one of the ways in which the eternal symbols and elements of humanity and nature can be fused into the modern visual language and the modern human world.

Mag. Ana Kocjančič, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2019

ELEMENTS

Axel Becker’s Me/n/tal Water

Water as a continuous repetitio essentially symbolizes the life cycle. From living springs to streams and rivers, from seas and oceans to sky and from sky back to the Earth. It appears as rain or snow, as dew or tear, why not, goes through a cycle from liquid, over vapor to the solid state. This water circulation reminds me of the myth of everlasting renewal, always in a new robe, confirming the great principle of metamorphosis. It is the sensory organ of the Earth, thanks to the water, it acquires sensibility and receptivity, shaping the surface of our planet. The Earth’s rotation and the motion of the Moon around the Earth inspire the exciting mixing of rivers, seas and oceans as an uninterrupted, live and elusive rhythm of the water. That is why the rivers, seas and the primeval waters defined the great civilizations of the ancient world. These were the rivers of civilization, but also the rivers of salvation to which were offered sacrifices in the name of the same belief in their heavenly and divine origin. As water is the original element and the great principle of life on Earth, all the world’s myths about creation speak of splitting of the water on the water above as heaven’s water and the water below as earth’s water, of which, after the initial flood or chaos, were created rivers and seas. In these myths about creation and cosmogonies, water is an element of chaos – that is, of undifferentiated life or all possible forms of life from which the life we ​​know was born. It is also a symbol of fertilization, blessing, purification /baptism/, wisdom, eternity, infinite and eternal love. Water is the one that cleans, alleviates, heals, brings blessings, consecrates and deifies. Heaven’s or earth’s, it is always the water of life in which one is immersed to be born and reborn. This image, deeply rooted in each people, has found its prominent place both in the Old and the New Testament and deserves deep respect and preservation. But, how and in what way Axel Becker artistically imposes that magical, powerful and elusive physis of water, one of his five elements that form the essence of his creative engagement, and transmit it as a metaphysis? Though he does not come from a highly educated art world but from the extremely exact, business milieu of financial economy, since childhood he has been close to the language of painting. It is a merit of his father who was a painter, but also of his sensibility that is permanently looking at the other, invisible image of reality. That is why his formative transposition and transcription from the real, over imaginative, to the material Axel Becker bridges using the postulates of permissiveness, a gift from a lavish postmodernism. Because, as a persuasive connoisseur and collector of contemporary art, Axel Becker knows that the painting doesn’t necessarily have to be a painting, that the painting as a colored substrate can legitimately bear a metal relief that is not a metal relief, or miniature sculptures that essentially are not sculptures, without questioning the credibility of that ensemble. Ultimately, he creates his thematic cycles on the principles of negation, appropriation and transformation, that is, on quite complex postulates which are achievable thanks to the characteristics of his human and creative habitus.

When I say negation, I mean the physical gift of nature, but also the physical elusiveness of the water that the author captures visually /appropriation/, then continuing its path of unconditional freedom in molten metal in an imaginative and associative manner of silver reflections /transformation/. The effect of these composite painting-objects on the one hand is visually interesting, while on the other it certainly requires further elaboration with less design and decorative elements. This pro futuro is likely to announce the discovery of the space of freedom beyond rigidly imposed exactness and exclusively central setting. Consequently, it can be presumed that the author will find the modus operandi even at the price of liberation of materiality, that is to say, that he will incline to the autonomy of both relief and freestanding objects, then metal reliefs and sculptures. And I do not mind that thought at all! Namely, Axel Becker has all the assumptions, from global knowledge to technical education, from the precision and preciousness of performing to his maximum responsibility. By the way, noble martial art, aikido, ones more determines his nature, but also the nature of his creativity. This paradoxical martial art in which there are neither winners nor defeated contains a significant spiritual component where the journey is as important as the goal. On this path, to be efficient, powerful, non-violent and in harmony with oneself and others is a permanent travel expense of each true admirer and practitioner of this discipline. If the author, with all the tools he possesses, has reached the technical and perfectionist habitus of his creativity, I believe that it is coming a new time of striding from the matter itself towards spiritual purity. When color, if needed, will not be only a passive surface, but it will start breathing and become the space of the soul into which one can freely enter and come out of, while future reliefs and sculptures, released from the imposed constraints, will continue the autonomous life of those who are unsubordinated. For now, this is the Time of Waters of Axel Becker.

Gorka Ostojic Cvajner, Croatia, 2018

For Axel Becker, the canvas is the of reflection on the present, paying special attention to materialism and linguistic chaos of modern society.

The exploration of the neutral space within which should be re-established the value of things and the authenticity of meaning seems to be the main intention of the German artist whose language, deliberately minimal, primarily uses straight lines, almost always monochrome, and a few other elements inserted in the surface as a “unity” that condenses the meaning of the art piece.

Sometimes, however, prevails a more geometric rhythm with shapes and lines that lead the observer’s view, allowing him to orient himself in the immaterial space.

Dott. Daniela Pronesti, Italy, 2018

The time of a liquid kiss – (Hymn to fervor and eros)

When everything is lost, God and wine will remain (Bela Hamvas)

The first encounter with the work of Axel Becker reminded me immediately of the teaching of Bela Hamvas, one of the greatest 20th-century Central European thinkers who in his capital work “The Philosophy of Wine” identifies this divine nectar with the very incarnation of God. The thoughts about wine, to think of wine and to study wine means to study yourself or to introspectively seek God in you. Not the satanic drop of damnation, but precisely the opposite – the divine spark. Moreover, I dare say that to study wine means to be deeply religious since wine, as Hamvas teaches us, is the only cure for stupidity, redemption for all sins, simply a gift from God. Wine is what releases us. Dionysus, the god of wine is de facto the only real liberator. To drink wine means to reject false life, hypocrisy, to reject false morality and suppressing of your true nature. To drink wine means to liberate yourself, to live here and now, sensuously, soulfully and ingeniously. A hymn to wine is a hymn to freedom, a hymn to soul, to eros and fervor. To paint, to illustrate, to portray, to make wine tangible and visible is only a sublime act and an insatiable craving for making that divine product, through an act of art, even more materialized and accessible to the eye. Similar to a sculptor’s passion for a woman and portraying and modeling women’s curves in one of his favorite materials. Analogously, the taste created by the encounter of palates and wines Becker portrays through associative role of color (the red color of Teran, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Burgundy or the yellow-gold Malvasia, white or gray Pinot, white Muscat etc.), through symbolism and, above all, tendency to eliminate visual elements. Just as when drinking wine, all the pain slowly disappears and everything that is unnecessary is being eliminated, we live for that moment, we enjoy the smells and tastes, we unite with our loved ones into a Dionysian whirl of passion, love and pleasures of senses. Wine, says Hamvas, is a “liquid kiss,” and drinking wine is “the closest relative of love.”

When it comes to the work of Axel Becker, I deliberately use the term creation, not painting, despite knowing that the painting outgrew the notion itself a long time ago, and therefore, in my opinion, the act of painting is at the same time an inadequate term that had seen its most brilliant days at the time of the peak of the technological superiority of Western civilization and in periods when modern art was at the same time strongly contested and called ugly. Becker belongs to the descendants of the celebrated generation of painters whose “animal”, ludic act of painting broke all the ties with the past and literally “desecrated” everything that the term “fine arts” meant in the past. It was the final clash of attitudes and, at the same time, the greatest fatal era of liberation in the context of art history, known under the name of expressionism. Exactly that was a teaching that further influenced the followers and contemporaries of other movements such as DADA, futurism, surrealism, and ultimately minimalism. After all, isn’t the elimination of all the unnecessary a final form of expression and a clear attitude towards a particular situation? Becker’s playing with psychic visual elements and psychological aspect of painting ultimately is the expression of his, at first glance, very rational nature, which will, in its spatial-illusionist game, in spite of the tendencies to purify the frame and through clear compositional conciseness, experience its liberation and apotheosis at the same time. Becker’s decision to study and love wine makes it clear that behind seemingly canonized stereotype and prevailing prejudice about Germanic coldness and glorification of beer, hides a warm, alive, secular (because being secular is the highest form of religiousness and self-chosen defense and wrestling with the devil himself) person whose spectrum of interests gravitates towards the Mediterranean, Hellenic zone where wine drinking culture is known since the era of Greek orgiastic feasts where Dionysian voluptuousness was experiencing its epilogue. It is a man who, with German organization and ethics, questions the delights of wine joy, is there anything out of the box of the northern order which nota bene governs the author’s painting, and whose suggestiveness and, above all, the orientation towards purity and colorism have a therapeutic note. Just like the wine, which, sprinkled on wounds of even Roman emperors, healed them faster.

The mission of Axel Becker and his wife Romana is to get to know and discern the quality, taste and smell of Istrian wines. Their voyage and quest for the “golden fleece” on the fertile peninsula called Istria is surely an excellent thing. First and foremost, their analytic approach and love for this peninsula has resulted in an excellent publication, Istria wine guide, offering offers systematization and localization of all the most important Istrian winemakers, and the second and most important fact is that after the premier exhibition at the Alvona Gallery in Labin, where he presented himself to the Croatian public, Becker’s creativity and exhibition activity is expanding to the rest of Europe. And speaking of his works, it should be noted that it is primarily about painting-objects whose nature varies from suprematistically oriented expression to objects whose functionalist reflection gets into the spectrum of design. Namely, if Becker’s objects had a kind of machine that would drive the needles of the corkscrew, his installations would indeed function as bold design solutions and clocks whose nature goes beyond the very act of painting. These are, in fact, ready-made products that in its core sublimate the experience of Man Ray and Duchamp, whose playing with ready made products have resulted in some of the boldest artistic achievements in the history of mankind. In the same way, Becker also uses corkscrews which he then inserts as an equal element in the constructions of his works. Thus, we come to the beginning of the story that proves that ready-made/recycled product in the service of the act of art is analogous to the scene of man as an image of God, mirror of himself. This is exactly what Hamvas is talking about when he writes about the sense of religiousness that has nothing to do with the religiousness of major world religions such as Christianity or Islam. The religiousness in its origin, which means in a form in which it is still unadvisable to mention any name, let alone a god. Only and exclusively the sense of divine nature, the divine reality with which a man met immediately at the beginning of his existence. For this reason, Nietzsche’s philosophy is not strange to him, and his writing seems to follow the instructions of the German philosopher who he quotes and according to which it is allowed to speak only: “in a cynical and innocent, incorrigibe and refined, almost wickedly clever way; and at the same time, with pure heart, merrily and simply as a birdsong! Aren’t Axel’s titles like “Wine time”, “Beginning”, “End”, “Half past ten”, “King Vincent” or “Sparkling enjoyment” exactly the quotes referring to biblical themes whose subversive cynicism invokes again by Nietzsche’s, Cioran’s or Shopenhauer’s secular sarcasm? This somewhat pawky and enthusiastic approach to the question of the deity reveals some postmodern feelings of today’s man. The original religiousness, just as Nietzsche claimed, we can live at all times, but only within ourselves, and Hamvas claimed the same.

For this reason, Becker’s painting is a clever blend of modernism, post avant-garde art practice, painting that comes out from its two-dimensionality and gets into a spectrum of sculpture. It is a sort of assamblage with the experience of Arman, Lucia Fontane and Yves Klein, which in the foreseeable future will certainly result in even more reductive solutions and even more accentuated, but nothing less minimalistic chords within the given score. In any case, the author deals with a very intuitive creative act and is on the path of creating his own personal manuscript and style. If, according to Croce’s definition of art, art is good to the extent that the primary expression can be felt, then it can be perceived that Becker’s most brilliant moments, in spite of overcoming ratio, strict precision and almost god fearing respecting the rules of strict compositional parameters, are precisely in those wrinkled remains of wine packaging, indented parabolas and pronounced diagonal lines. The law of drinking is like the law of love: anytime, anywhere and anyway. But, as well as in love, in drinking are important all the circumstances, same as in the works of Axel Becker, the author whose painting, if he dedicates himself to it as analytically as to the wine research, will over time, I am sure, follow the destiny of every carefully treated “liquid kiss”.

Vedran Silipetar, Professor of Art, Pula, Christmas, Anno Domini 2013